Some Take the Glass Escalator, Some Hit the Glass Ceiling?

Abstract

Results from analyses of a large Swedish longitudinal data set suggest that men who work in typically female occupations have substantially better internal promotion chances than have equally qualified women in such occupations. This finding is compatible with the idea that a socalled glass escalator takes underrepresented men on an upwardly mobile internal career path at a speed that their female colleagues can hardly enjoy. Furthermore, the results indicate that men and women have equal internal career chances in male-dominated occupations. Hence, the common assumption that obstacles to women’s internal career growth are especially severe in male-dominated fields of work obtains no support.